On Mar 7, 2011, at 5:06 AM, Stan Halpin wrote: > Larry, I would suggest a #4 for your list of what the customer expects: The > ability to know the difference between best quality and not so best quality > photos. > In other words, I agree that customers would like to chose which photo(s) to > keep from a portrait session, but they shouldn't have to sort through crap to > find the good ones. Or even need to sort through umpteen good shots that are > essentially duplicates of one another. I think they expect you to exercise > some judgment in pruning down the set by eliminating the obvious bad ones > where the lighting or focus are a bit off. Then out of the many good ones you > have left, make some quick choices. If you have 17 images 3/4 left front with > single light, and you have dozens if not hundreds more with different angles, > lighting etc., then make a quick choice of 2-3 from the 17 and move on.
Stan, those are all very good points. In the same vein, most people when they go to a service station, would like for someone to come out, pump their gas, check their oil, wash their windshields, check their tires etc. But, given the choice to do that themselves and save a few bucks, or to pay extra for the full service.... Take a look around and see how many service stations even offer full service at the pumps. As it turns out, in most of my photo shoots the photo selection is done by iterative passes by both my subjects and myself. In the interest of getting a proof disk before they leave that day, most everyone has been happy to sit down and do some rating and selection between photo sessions, while I'm fiddling with gear, or just taking a break. The session that I was initially talking about was the portrait party from last weekend, where I was photographing nearly continuously for about three hours. While one subject was changing clothes after a session, I'd be photographing the next one. The ones that weren't busy, spent some time making a first quick pass on the photos, right there, on my laptop. They narrowed down the 1200 frames to 635. I then spent the next two days going through those frames, weeding out about 3/4 of those: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157626164718174/ It then took a great deal of effort getting feedback from the women which two photos each one wanted prints of, and when I sent them emails saying "these are the photos that I'm making prints of", I only heard back from one of them. So, in short, I spent at least a couple times as long as I did shooting, going through pretty much the process that you described. The point of the portrait parties is to do the portraits more efficiently so that I don't need to charge as much to cover the cost of my time. >From a business point of view, I can do the photography efficiently and get >good shots of a large number of models in a short period of time. I'm just >mired down in the length of time that it takes to convert those photos into a >sellable product. I never intended to go professional, for just these reasons, >and the more I do it, the more incentive I have to polish up my resume as an >engineer. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
